2 Desert Prophets Of Sanctuary Pray, Await Martyrdom

April 27, 1986|By Howard Witt, Chicago Tribune.

TUCSON — Since 1981, when they founded an underground railroad to aid Central American refugees fleeing their war-torn countries, James Corbett and Rev. John Fife say they have known that a few highly publicized martyrs would be of immeasurable value to their sanctuary movement.

They are now waiting, as a federal court jury here deliberates over whether the two men conspired with nine other church activists to defy U.S. immigration laws, to see whether they will get their wish.

``If we are convicted and go to prison, the government will have given the sanctuary movement the gift of a large group of martyrs,`` Rev. Fife said last week. ``Every spiritual movement of this kind has been strengthened by martyrs, by people who have been imprisoned because of their faith.``

Here in the Arizona desert, where the church sanctuary movement was born, the U.S. Justice Department has been attempting for the last six months to prove in court that the 11 sanctuary workers conspired to smuggle Central Americans into the United States.

Jurors have been wrestling with the complex case, involving 30 separate criminal counts, for more than a week. U.S. District Court Judge Earl Carroll sent the jury home for the weekend. They will resume deliberations Tuesday.

The case frequently is cited as the most serious clash of church and state in a generation, because the Immigration and Naturalization Service gathered much of its evidence through a paid informant, Jesus Cruz, who infiltrated church meetings and Bible classes wearing a body microphone.

The often rancorous trial also has been seen as a bitter test of wills between the Reagan administration and the national sanctuary movement, which insists that federal immigration officials choose which Central American refugees to accept according to the politics of the government they are fleeing. The sanctuary workers say their religious and humanitarian beliefs compel them to aid the refugees, most of whom are from El Salvador and Guatemala, where the U.S. supports the governments in power.

Few of those arguments, however, made it into court, because the judge regularly disallowed evidence concerning the religious motivations of the defendants or the dangers that the refugees said they were fleeing. Partly out of frustration over those rulings, defense attorneys chose to rest their case without calling the defendants or any witnesses to the stand.

Stymied inside the courtroom in their efforts to spread their message, the sanctuary defendants simply moved two blocks down the street to a suite of offices from which they have orchestrated an intensive public-relations effort. They think it is working.

``The trial has helped us enormously,`` said Rev. Fife, 46, pastor of the small Southside Presbyterian Church, the first to publicly declare itself a sanctuary. ``Since the indictments were announced, we have more than doubled the number of churches in the movement.``

That number, sanctuary leaders say, stands at about 300 churches and synagogues nationwide; 18 cities, New Mexico and several major religious denominations have expressed support.

``There is no question that the government engineered this as a show trial,`` said Corbett, 52, a former college professor, retired rancher and Quaker. ``They figured that the church was like a government or a state or a company they could intimidate by dragging it into court. By now they must have realized they were sadly mistaken.``

Government spokesmen vigorously deny such assertions.

``The sanctuary movement is not a threat. Three hundred churches out of 339,000 in the U.S. are not exactly a groundswell of support,`` INS spokesman Duke Austin said. ``As far as we are concerned, these are people who have publicly admitted they were breaking immigration laws. It`s that simple.``

In fact, nothing in the sanctuary debate is that simple, a point underscored last week as the Justice Department acknowledged it may change the way it classifies Nicaraguans seeking asylum in the U.S.

Under the 1980 Refugee Act, intended to strip politics from the asylum process, applicants for asylum must show they have a ``well-founded fear of persecution`` in their home countries, regardless of the type of government they are fleeing.

But the Reagan administration has approved far fewer asylum applications from Salvadorans and Guatemalans than from refugees fleeing communist countries that the White House opposes.

Last year, for example, only 5 percent of Salvadorans and 2 percent of Guatemalans applying for asylum were approved by the immigration service, while 11 percent of Nicaraguans and more than one-third of applicants from Poland and Afghanistan were approved.

Immigration officials argue that Salvadoran peasants are fleeing general violence and economic conditions in their country and have a harder time proving they are the victims of persecution than applicants fleeing communist countries.